Ep. 098 | Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: Boston [Part 1]

In the summer of 2001, newly appointed Boston Globe editor Marty Baron spotted a buried allegation in a court filing: Cardinal Bernard Law had knowingly reassigned a priest, John J. Geoghan, despite prior allegations of child sexual abuse.

Baron didn’t hesitate. He handed the lead to the Globe’s elite investigative unit, the Spotlight Team, tasking them with a simple but ominous question: Had the Archdiocese of Boston knowingly protected a child abuser? The team thought they were digging into one man’s crimes. What they uncovered instead was a sprawling, decades-long conspiracy of silence.

By the end of 2002, the Spotlight Team had identified over 150 priests in the Boston Archdiocese credibly accused of sexually abusing children—many of them shielded by Church leadership, quietly reassigned from parish to parish while their victims were left in darkness.

And the scandal didn’t stop there.

In July 2003, Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly released a report that stunned even the most hardened investigators: from 1940 to 2000, 237 priests and 13 other Church employees had likely abused at least 789 children in the Boston Archdiocese alone. The real number, Reilly warned, was likely far higher—over 1,000 victims, many of them still too ashamed, afraid, or broken to speak.

This is the story of how four reporters, two editors, and one researcher took on one of the most powerful institutions in the world—and exposed a massive, institutional cover-up of child sexual abuse inside the Catholic Church.

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